... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 8) June 1985 Last| Contents| Next Issue 8 Books Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA Jim Hougan (Random House, US 1984) Those who read Hougan's last book Spooks will know that the arrival or a new one is something of an event. As expected, his latest has so many trails to follow, intriguing little titbits to ponder that one read is insufficient to do justice to what I expect to be a major work. Having read it once- and then as if it was a political thriller (which it is)- I will be brief and leave it to others to gauge its true ...

... interests are. Each bureaucracy has its own language of ideals which it is working for, but there are overall governing forces to make sure they don't get out of hand. The system is able to bring a maverick agency (like the FBI under Hoover) back into line. The classic example of this is the Presidency, Nixon and Watergate. Here is an interesting case where a President was perceived by other elements in the system as amassing more than his share of the power and he had to be brought to heel. He was totally humiliated by a group of institutions- like the Washington Post, the big TV networks- all of whom thought they were fighting for ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 6) November 1984 Last| Contents| Next Issue 6 Kincoragate: parapolitics Steve Dorril Parapolitics: "Generally, covert politics, the conduct of public affairs not by rational debate and responsible decision-making but by indirection, collusion and deceit."- Peter Dale Scott The Watergate tag is appropriate to Kincora because, like that epic affair, an initial minor offence was the key that unlocked many secret doors. As James Angleton noted: "A mansion has many rooms." The continuing leaks and revelations in Northern Ireland are gradually drawing in the higher echelons of Britain's secret state. As the net becomes wider the covert war of the last 14 ...

... is one that CCS planned 'left wing' riots and the assassination of Nixon for the Republican Convention of 1972, apparently in the hope of installing Vice President Agnew as some kind of dictator. Although this story is quite widely accepted among the US conspiracy buffs, the exact status it has remains unclear to me. Tackwood linked two of the Watergate 'plumbers', McCord and Hunt, to the LAPD. (The various official Watergate enquiries managed to miss all this.) In 1975 the Los Angeles Police Commission (a civilian body somewhat akin to our Police Committees) ordered 2 million police intelligence files accumulated since the 1950s, to be destroyed. Nothing was done. In 1983 ...

... of innocence which existed before the Bay of Pigs. The 'menace' is, once again just the Soviet Union: it is the KGB which is the conspiratorial fifth wheel of history- not the CIA. Epstein writes for all the world as if none of the revelations about the real nature of American political life that occurred between Dallas and Watergate, had ever existed; and in this innocent world of black hats and white hats he would have us believe that only James Angleton, the erstwhile head of CIA Counter Intelligence, perceived the reality of the Soviet menace. (4) Angleton and his senior colleagues in CI were forced out of the Agency in late 1974 by the ...